Intel Core i5-14600K Benchmarked, Specifications Revealed

Chinese media ECSM has obtained what it claims is an Intel Core i5-14600K processor and tested it in several CPU-bound benchmarks. The unit performed somewhat better than its direct predecessor, the Core i5-13600K, albeit at the cost of higher voltage and power consumption. Meanwhile, these early test results must be taken with a grain of salt since we are probably dealing with pre-production hardware. 

Intel’s Core i5-14600K belongs to the ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ family of CPUs. It carries six high-performance Raptor Cove cores running at 3.50 GHz base clock and up to 5.30 GHz turbo (+200 MHz vs. its predecessor) along with eight energy-efficient Gracemont cores running at up to 4.0 GHz (+100 MHz). Like its direct predecessor, the Core i5-13600K, the new CPU has a 24 MB L3 cache and has a PBP of 125W. Meanwhile, the new unit has a core voltage of 1.2 V, whereas its ancestor is happy with 1.14 V.

Journalists from ECSM tested the new CPU in Cinebench R23, Cinebench 2024, and CPU-Z. Performance gains obtained from Intel’s Core i5-14600K compared to the company’s Core i5-13600K vary from 2.5% to 10.3%, depending on the benchmark. Meanwhile, the CPU drew 160W of power during the benchmarking. However, there are some things to keep in mind here.

Performance of Intel’s Core i5-13600K vs Core i5-14600K 

The ECSM journalists decided not to share details about the testbed they used, significantly reducing the credibility of the results. Furthermore, since these benchmarks are not among our typical CPU tests, we had to Google results for the Core i5-13600K. We found the data at Guru3D for CPU-Z, CPU-Monkey for Cinebench R23 (single-core, multi-core), and CPU-Monkey for Cinebench 2024 (single-core, multi-core). Meanwhile, neither of these websites revealed the configurations of their testbeds, so the comparison may not be completely accurate.

Finally, these are synthetic benchmarks and have little bearing on real-life applications, so while we can say that the new Core i5-12600K ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ is faster than its direct predecessor, we can hardly confirm how much faster this CPU is in actual games or professional applications.

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.